Water reservoirs created by damming rivers could have significant impacts on the world’s carbon cycle and climate system that aren’t being accounted for, a new study concludes.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Waterloo and the Université libre de Bruxelles, appears in Nature Communications. It found that human-made dam reservoirs trap nearly one-fifth of the organic carbon moving from land to ocean via the world’s rivers.

While they can act as a significant source or sink for carbon dioxide, reservoirs are poorly represented in current climate change models.

“Dams don’t just have local environmental impacts. It’s clear they play a key role in the global carbon cycle and therefore Earth’s climate,” said Philippe Van Cappellen, a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Ecohydrology at Waterloo and the study’s co-author. “For more accurate climate predictions, we need to better understand the impact of reservoirs.”

There are currently in excess of 70,000 large dams worldwide. With the continuing construction of new dams, more than 90 per cent of the world’s rivers will be fragmented by at least one dam within the next 15 years.

The study’s researchers used a novel method to determine what happens to organic carbon traveling down rivers and were able to capture the impact of more than 70 per cent of the world’s human-made reservoirs by volume. Their model links known physical parameters such as water flow and reservoir size with processes that determine the fate of organic carbon in impounded rivers.

“With the model used in this study, we can better quantify and predict how dams affect carbon exchanges on a global scale,” said Van Cappellen, a professor in Waterloo’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

In similar recent studies, the group of researchers also found that ongoing dam construction impedes the transport of nutrients such as phosphorus, nitrogen and silicon through river networks. The changes in nutrient flow have global impacts on the quality of water delivered to wetlands, lakes, floodplains and coastal marine areas downstream.

“We’re essentially increasing the number of artificial lakes every time we build a dam,” said Taylor Maavara, lead author and a PhD student at Waterloo. “This changes the flow of water and the materials it carries, including nutrients and carbon.”

The Guardian, 24 March 2017

It appears that the current and planned boom of hydroelectric projects would double the current cover of dams in the world and will aggravate the problem.

Researchers found that rotting vegetation in the water means that the dams emit about a billion tonnes of greenhouse gases every year. This represents 1.3% of total annual anthropogenic (human-caused) global emissions. When considered over a 100-year timescale, dams produce more methane than rice plantations and biomass burning, the study showed.

“We estimate that dams emit around 25% more methane by unit of surface than previously estimated,” said Bridget Deemer, from the School of Environment at the Washington State University in Vancouver, and lead author of the study.

“Methane stays in the atmosphere for only around a decade, while CO2 stays several centuries, but over the course of 20 years methane contributes almost three times more to global warming than CO2, a relevant period for policymakers,” she added.

Methane is produced at the bottom of the reservoirs, where oxygen is low and bacteria decompose organic material, like trees and grasses, which is already present or carried by watercourse. Part of the methane becomes CO2; the rest is carried to the surface as bubbles.

Analysing more than 250 dams and including bubble-based emissions, the researchers found that dams also emit more methane than lakes and wetlands.

Emily Stanley, a professor in liminology and marine science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that the study is “very relevant” because it delivers the best available information about greenhouse gas emissions from dams. It shows that high methane emissions are not linked to the location or antiquity of the reservoirs, as other researchers suggest, but to the quantity of organic material.

According to the study, algae that proliferates in downstream dams may receive more nutrients such as nitrogen or phosphate, and therefore produce more methane.

Deemer is enthusiastic about the possibilities that this research presents for designing, situating and operating dams that emit fewer gases.

The 126MW Soviet-built Qairokkum plant in Tajikistan. Protesters say 19m fish are being killed each year by the dam’s turbines. Photograph: Courtesy of CIF Action

Plans to earmark more than $136m (£109m) of UN money for large dam projects in Nepal, Tajikistan and the Solomon Islands have been angrily condemned by activists, who have warned the projects could have serious environmental consequences.

The UN’s green climate fund was set up during the Paris climate agreement to mobilise $100bn a year by 2020 for poor countries looking for innovative and transformational projects.

These were supposed to promote “paradigm shifts” to clean and climate-resilient energy, in the context of the UN’s sustainable development goals. However, to use the green climate fund to build mega dams ignores the risk they pose to ecology as well as climate.

An alliance of green groups claims that the Tajik funding would merely patch up a decrepit Soviet-era dam, while the Solomon Islands project would flood forests and vegetation, threatening biodiversity and releasing large volumes of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

Andrea Rodriguez, a senior attorney for the Inter-American Association for Environmental Defence, said the projects would have “tremendous negative impacts” on ecosystems and indigenous people.

“Large dams are not suited to adapt to climate risks because they alter seasonal patterns, by storing floods and increasing dry period flows,” she told the Guardian. “Large infrastructure does not guarantee development or climate solutions.”

A protest letter to the board, seen by the Guardian, says that 19m fish are currently being killed each year by turbines at the 126MW Soviet-built Qairokkum plant in Tajikistan. The country’s electricity network is already 98% reliant on hydropower, powered by shrinking glacier melt volumes.

In Nepal, the 216MW Upper Trishuli-1 project “would have no transformational impact,” the letter says. “It faces severe climate and disaster risks, and it would have significant impacts on indigenous communities – and the environment – that have not been adequately studied, nor mitigation plans prepared.”

The letter was signed by nine groups including Friends of the Earth, the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Foundation and the Centre for International Environmental Law.

But critics say this fails to take into account up to a billion tonnes of greenhouse gases created by dams each year, as well as the damage often inflicted on carbon sinks, and hydropower’s vulnerability to shifts in rainfall patterns likely to accelerate because of climate change.

In all, nine projects worth $854m will be discussed by the green climate fund’s 24-person board in a meeting in Songdo, South Korea, on Tuesday.

Fund board members declined requests for interview, but officials confirmed that the informal meeting would try to reach consensus on the projects.

One source said: “There’s an expectation that the board will consider these funding proposals – and the three [hydro projects] are part of them, so most likely they will address them. It is the usual approach.”

Other projects up for consideration include a $100m programme to help Ethiopian women threatened by drought, and $55m for water irrigation and conservation projects in Morocco.

If all projects are approved, they will take the fund’s disbursements to far to $2.4bn, 62% of which have gone to Africa and 23% to Asia-Pacific region.

Half of the money has been spent on climate mitigation – renewable energy and power efficiency investments – with the remainder split between adaptation to climate change, and “cross-cutting” programmes that contain elements of both.

A recent article in BioScience confirms a significant volume of greenhouse gas emissions coming from a little-considered place: Man-made reservoirs, held behind some 1 million dams around the world and created for the purposes of electricity generation, irrigation, and other human needs. In the study, 10 authors from U.S., Canadian, Chinese, Brazilian, and Dutch universities and institutions have synthesized a considerable body of prior research on the subject to conclude that these reservoirs may be emitting just shy of a gigaton, or billion tons, of annual carbon dioxide equivalents. That would mean they contributed 1.3 percent of the global total.Moreover, the emissions are largely in the form of methane, a greenhouse gas with a relatively short life in the atmosphere but a very strong short-term warming effect. Scientists are increasingly finding that although we have begun to curb some emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, we are still thwarted by methane, which comes from a diversity of sources that range from oil and gas operations to cows.

The new research concludes that methane accounted for 79 percent of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions from reservoirs, while the other two greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, accounted for 17 percent and 4 percent.

“There’s been kind of an explosion in research into efforts to estimate emissions from reservoirs,” said Bridget Deemer, the study’s first author and a researcher with Washington State University. “So we synthesized all known estimates from reservoirs globally, for hydropower and other functions, like flood control and irrigation.”

“And we found that the estimates of methane emissions per area of reservoir are about 25 percent higher than previously thought, which we think is significant given the global boom in dam construction, which is currently underway,” she continued.

As Deemer’s words suggest, the study does not single out dams used to generate electricity — it focuses on all reservoirs, including those that are created for other purposes. It drew on studies on 267 reservoirs around the world, which together have a surface area of close to 30,000 square miles, to extrapolate global data.

Reservoirs are a classic instance of how major human alteration’s to the Earth’s landscape can have unexpected effects. Flooding large areas of Earth can set off new chemical processes as tiny microorganisms break down organic matter in the water, sometimes doing so in the absence of oxygen — a process that leads to methane as a byproduct. One reason this happens is that the flooded areas initially contain lots of organic life in the form of trees and grasses.

Meanwhile, as nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus flow into reservoirs from rivers — being poured in by human agriculture and waste streams — these can further drive algal growth in reservoirs, giving microorganisms even more material to break down. The study finds that for these reasons, reservoirs emit more methane than “natural lakes, ponds, rivers, or wetlands.”

“If oxygen is around, then methane gets converted back to CO2,” said John Harrison, another of the study’s authors, and also a researcher at Washington State. “If oxygen isn’t present, it can get emitted back to the atmosphere as methane.”And flooded areas, he said, are more likely to be depleted of oxygen. A similar process occurs in rice paddies, which are also a major source of methane emissions.

In fact, Harrison said that based on the new study, it appears that reservoir emissions and rice paddy emissions are of about the same magnitude on a global scale — but rice paddy emissions have been taken into account for some time. Reservoir emissions often have not.

‘There are inventory compilers in each country that are responsible for compiling information about greenhouse gases to the atmosphere,” Harrison explained. “The [United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] writes the guidance, the cookbook that’s supposed to be used by these inventory compilers, and that guidance currently includes reservoirs only as an appendix, not an official part of any nation’s inventory. But that is likely to change as those guidelines get revised over the next two years.”

The research, said Deemer, complicates the idea that hydropower is a carbon-neutral source of energy, although she stresses that the authors aren’t saying that they’re against using large bodies of water to generate energy through dams. Rather, they’re arguing that the greenhouse gas calculus has to be included in evaluating such projects.

This problem is not an entirely new one: A major 2000 study in BioScience raised this issue, and the International Hydropower Association on its website acknowledges that “While hydropower is a very low-carbon technology, it is known that some reservoirs in certain conditions can release quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas. Reservoirs can also, in other circumstances, act as carbon sinks.”

But what is new about the current study is its synthesis of a large number of studies since 2000, and the determination that these emissions add up to something that is big enough to be taken seriously as part of the global carbon budget. It also finds that while some reservoirs are indeed “sinks” for carbon dioxide or nitrous oxide — meaning, they take up more of these gases than they emit — that was not true for methane.

The authors acknowledge the study does not represent a full “life cycle analysis” of reservoirs, taking into account how much carbon was stored (or emitted from) lands prior to their being flooded, and also what happens after reservoirs are decommissioned. Nor does it attempt to weigh the methane emissions from reservoirs used to generate hydropower against the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that would presumably be created if that electricity was instead generated by burning coal or natural gas.

But it clearly suggests a need to take these emissions seriously, and conduct further research.

“We’re trying to provide policymakers and the public with a more complete picture of the consequences of damming a river,” said Harrison.

Correction: A prior title of this article suggested that methane emissions from reservoirs are a “key new source of greenhouse gases.” In fact, scientific budgets of global methane emissions have included reservoir emissions in the category of lakes and rivers, according to Harrison. The new research, however, does suggest that reservoir emissions may have been underestimated in such budgets.

Hundreds of new dams could mean trouble for our climate

Sediment trapped behind dams, such as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, can become a feeding ground for microbes that burp methane. Airwolfhound/Flicker (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Using rivers and dams to make electricity is often touted as a win for the climate, a renewable source of electricity without the greenhouse gases that come from burning fossil fuels. But it turns out hydropower isn’t quite so squeaky clean—and with countries around the world poised to erect hundreds of new dams, that could have big implications for future emissions.

Reservoirs already contribute roughly 1.3% of the world’s annual human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, the study finds—about as much as the entire nation of Canada. It also suggests future reservoirs will have a bigger impact than expected, largely because they emit much more methane, a potent warming gas, than once believed. The methane is produced by underwater microbes that feast on the organic matter that piles up in the lake sediments trapped by dams.

At a time when nations have as many as 847 large hydroelectric dams in the works, the finding “suggests that the impact of that global impoundment will be greater than previously thought,” says John Harrison, a biogeochemist at Washington State University, Vancouver, and one of the authors of the paper, scheduled to be published next week in BioScience.

Harrison and colleagues compiled and analyzed the findings of more than 100 studies of emissions from more than 250 reservoirs around the world. They also took account of a factor some previous studies of reservoir emissions had overlooked: bubbles. Some greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, readily dissolve in water and then diffuse into the atmosphere in a fairly uniform way. Methane, in contrast, often surfaces in sporadic bubbles. That’s made it hard to get a clear picture of how much of the warming gas—which is 34 times more powerful than carbon dioxide—is rising off a reservoir.

But new tools, such as special bubble-tracking sonar, have turned up a lot more methane. On average, studies that included methane bubbles found more than double the amount of the gas coming from reservoirs. Overall, the researchers concluded that each square meter of reservoir surface exhaled 25% more methane into the atmosphere than previously thought.

For existing reservoirs, the new study found a slightly lower total amount of greenhouse gases—770 megatons per year—than previous studies. That’s because the researchers used a new, lower estimate for the total size of the world’s reservoirs, Harrison says. But the higher methane emissions per unit area mean that the impact of future dams could be larger than expected.

Vincent St. Louis, a biogeochemist at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, in Canada and lead author of a 2000 BioScience paper that was the first to gauge global emissions from reservoirs, praised the new study for highlighting the importance of this particular greenhouse gas. “Methane’s the story, and we need to get a better handle on the methane part of things,” he says.

The focus on methane could help guide decisions about where to put a dam, Harrison says. Dams on river systems with fewer nutrients to feed algae growth could produce less methane, for instance, than dams on higher nutrient streams. St. Louis adds that the new study also shows the potential cost of siting dams in dry landscapes, which can absorb and break down methane, but might become methane producers if drowned beneath a reservoir.

The results also highlight the importance of adding reservoirs to the calculations that countries make to gauge their overall greenhouse gas emissions, Harrison says. Today, greenhouse gases coming from those water bodies aren’t counted, though activities that produce comparable amounts of planet-warming gas, such as growing rice, are. But the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, an arm of the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is weighing whether to include reservoirs in a new set of guidelines to be released in 2019.

“Dams provide a lot of important services,” Harrison says. “They’re often considered clean, renewable sources of power, and the greenhouse gas emissions are not considered. The work that we and others are doing helps to tell the whole story.”

“That’s the call. It’s for life — it’s so that others will have life, as Jesus said in the Gospel; he came so that we would have life, and life in abundance. And this system doesn’t support life; it’s a system that kills, as the Holy Father said. It’s a system of death. And now we’re seeing the effects of a system of death.” – Sr. Tita

Sr. Edia “Hermana Tita” López was living out her mission as a Sister of Mercy, seeking the best ways to serve the poor and disenfranchised of Immaculate Conception Parish in La Concepción on the western end of Panama, when she learned of a plan that would leave many far poorer.

She heard about a “public consultation” in the nearby town of Volcán, and along with religious in the Vincentian community where she was working in 2005, they went to see what it was about. Church and community leaders were shocked to learn that a company was planning to build 11 hydroelectric dams on the largest river in the area, Río Chiriquí Viejo.

Once known for its spectacular whitewater rafting and lush riparian forests filled with wildlife, Chiriquí Viejo was a Neotropical gem. Along its banks, farmers produced much of the food for the nation.

López was alarmed.

“We realized it was being called a consultation, but it wasn’t a consultation,” she said. “So we asked questions: What can the community do to stop the development of this project, which was going to have serious effects on our water?”

They were told that the environmental impact statement had been approved, and anyone who wanted to register their opposition would have to file a lawsuit within 15 days.

That meeting drew López into a struggle that has become a constant theme in her life and for many others in Panama and elsewhere throughout Latin America. Hydropower development has exploded in recent years as the region’s energy needs have surged, and the river-rich mountainous terrain that has sustained indigenous and campesino populations has been tapped as a source of so-called “green” energy.

Sr. Edia “Tita” López has been a constant presence in the fight against hydroelectric dams in Panama since 2005. (Tracy L. Barnett)

Many projects are concentrated in Chiriquí, and a number have become focal points of fierce resistance — like the town of Paraíso, not far from where López once worked, and La Cuchilla Dam, which sparked opposition from thousands, to no avail.

Hydropower dams have been used as a strategy for ramping up development in Panama‘s rural areas since the era of military dictator Omar Torrijos, who flooded 350 square miles of Emberá and Kuna tribal rainforest in 1976 with the 260-megawatt Bayano Dam. On a global level, dams have displaced between 40 million and 80 million people, fragmented two-thirds of the world’s rivers, wiped out entire ecosystems, and produced a billion tons of one of the most potent greenhouse gases, methane, produced by decaying vegetation.

(YouTube / CSDMSmovie)

While hydro dams are being dismantled and rivers restored in North America, many continue to be constructed in the developing world, fueled in part by rewarding them carbon credits as a supposed mitigation for carbon-generating projects elsewhere.

López and others in her parish began to look into the effects of hydroelectric dams on local communities and ecosystems, and what they found was alarming. She and several others in the community flew into action. They formed a group — the Coordinating Committee of the Missionary Team of La Concepción for the Defense of the Environment and Ecosystems (CEMCODE, for its acronym in Spanish) and found a lawyer to file a lawsuit.

They lost the case, but the group made the issue a priority, and continued to fight, organizing educational meetings about the effects of hydroelectric dams in the affected communities up and down the river.

Four communities were severely impacted, she said, beginning with the social dynamic of a large workforce of single men in small towns.

“Families were divided in the area, there was a lot of divorce, prostitution proliferated, the campesina girls would go when the workers came to put up the dams,” recalls López. “There were terrible effects on the population.”

The toll on the land soon became evident. “Chiriquí Viejo: A Lost Treasure,” one newspaper columnist wrote. The river was fragmented; areas once abundant with many kinds of fish were now nearly dry. Tributaries and springs that farmers had used to water their fields dried up, making agriculture difficult in some areas and impossible in others. Levels in local wells dropped precipitously during the dry season. The nascent ecotourism industry was choked out.

Members of the Coordinadora Bugabeña at their regular meeting place, Immaculate Concepción Parish in La Concepción, Panama (Tracy L. Barnett)

Particularly infuriating was that even in the towns that were promised abundant water and electricity from the dams, there were frequent shortages of both.

“It fell to us to take testimonies, and as you can imagine, it’s a process of many years,” López said. “We stopped filing lawsuits because the court is also corrupted. It is bought; we weren’t going to win anything.”

In 2010, word came of the struggle of the Ngäbe-Buglé Comarca, or autonomous territory, where a battle was unfolding against mining and hydroelectric projects. The Ngäbe people responded with a force that breathed hope and energy into a struggling movement, López said. She moved to the comarca — just a few hours away and still in the province of Chiriquí, but a whole different world culturally — and soon found herself once again on the front lines of a battle that exploded into the international consciousness in February 2012. (See “A wall in their river” on Global Sisters Report.)

After a particularly violent police confrontation in which two people died, López helped organize a search party for missing people; fortunately, there were no other casualties. At the height of the struggle, she recalls, she began to be followed by a car with dark windows, and she suspected her phone was being wiretapped.

La Cuchilla Dam was constructed on the Macho del Monte River despite the protests of thousands, and the river’s once strong currents have been reduced to a trickle. (Tracy L. Barnett)

None of this made her step back.

“On the contrary,” she said with a defiant laugh. “It makes me want to put aside other things that take time from this to dedicate more time to supporting people in the resistance. I wish that we as sisters could dedicate more time to this subject, which is our responsibility — because the most affected are the most poor. And if we are to accompany the poorest, we must be prepared to accompany them in resistance.

“And that’s the call. It’s for life — it’s so that others will have life, as Jesus said in the Gospel; he came so that we would have life, and life in abundance. And this system doesn’t support life; it’s a system that kills, as the Holy Father said. It’s a system of death. And now we’re seeing the effects of a system of death.”

History repeats

La Concepción, the municipal center of the Bugaba district of Chiriquí, is home to the parish of the Immaculate Conception, where the words of St. Vincent de Paul are emblazoned: “The poor are my burden and my sorrow.”

This is the nerve center of what was once CEMCODE and now is the Coordinadora Bugabeña Contra las Hidroeléctricas (Coordinating Committee of Bugaba Against Hydroelectric Dams), the place where López once labored, and where Vincentian Fr. Eric Obaldía carries on. It was here that the 5,000-strong marches against La Cuchilla Dam on the Macho del Monte River were organized, and here where the resistance against the Piedra River dam, called La Chuspa, was solidified.

Chiriquí produces 60-80 percent of Panamá’s food. The government’s decision to sell the water rights in the region’s rivers are a serious threat to food sovereignty throughout the region, said Obaldía — which means a population’s capacity to produce its own food, as opposed to food security, which in his view means importing it. The communities, the environment and the farmers should have first rights to the water, he said, but the company has the right to 90 percent of the water.

Sabdi Granda, left, and Damaris Sánchez contemplate the dam that was recently finished on the river where their families once picnicked and swam. (Tracy L. Barnett)

One morning in March, a diverse group of committee members gathered at the church — campesinos, housewives, professionals, retirees. They were there to share their stories and their outrage. Two years of intense organizing against the La Cuchilla Dam had come to naught. The dam had been built on the mighty Macho del Monte River just upstream from the town’s new water treatment plant — one they had lobbied for through year after year of unreliable water service. Now they worried about further water shortages and quality issues resulting from the dam.

Mavis Espinoza explained how her family had offered to donate a hectare of their land to build the plant; it ended up taking three hectares, but she had given it gladly, she said, because the community desperately needed the water.

The plant was 90 percent complete when the director of IDAAN, the federal agency responsible for aqueducts, dams and sewerage, came to town in March 2015 to announce two hydroelectric dams upriver from the plant, one immediately above the water intake for the treatment plant.

“We were furious,” she said. “We couldn’t understand the reason for this contradiction when the water in a water treatment plant is primordial for the health of the town’s inhabitants.”

Contacted for an interview, IDAAN’s public relations department responded that environmental concerns should be directed to MiAmbiente, the environmental agency. MiAmbiente did not respond, nor did ASEP, the federal public services agency.

As López did a decade before, the coordinating committee flew into action, filing protests with the relevant agencies, filing a lawsuit, organizing a march that drew 5,000 people. The dam was built anyway.

The water treatment plant began operating last August but has been plagued with problems. In September, it was clogged by sedimentation and debris following high rains and shut down, leaving thousands without water. President Juan Carlos Varela personally went to inaugurate the plant two weeks ago and it was out of service because of a broken control valve.

Damaris Sánchez, leader of FUNDICCEP, a sustainable development initiative in the town of Cerro Punta in the north of Bugaba, loaded a group into her pickup truck and headed up to survey the damage. It had been several months since she and Sabdi Granda, secretary of the coordinating committee, had been back to see the dam.

Along with many other environmental groups throughout the country, FUNDICCEP had been fighting a proposed highway through the Barú Volcano National Park in 2002-2004, she explained — which they won. But they emerged from that fight to find that the government had meanwhile granted concessions to build dozens of dams on the rivers throughout the area. They only became aware when the companies began coming into the communities to announce their projects. In 2006, she and others concerned about the dams braced themselves for a new battle.

A banner at the protest camp in Paraíso shows the 69 dams currently operating, under construction and in the planning phases in Chiriquí. (Tracy L. Barnett)

“The projects came with a number of promises to the population and with the government saying that Panama is growing and developing and needed energy, that if we didn’t supply it, we could run out of electricity,” she recalled. “And that fear plus the promises made the projects seem a necessity of national interest.”

In the province of Chiriquí alone, 72 concessions were awarded for hydroelectric projects, of which 34 have been installed so far.

About two dozen more are still being built despite the degradation of watersheds and opposition of communities, said Sánchez. “There was no preliminary study that said the watershed produces so much water, and these concessions were given without taking into account the people who use that water.”

The truck came to a halt after a 40-minute drive through freshly paved, winding mountain roads to an overlook above a chain-link fence with the word IDAAN emblazoned on the gate. The women gasped to see what had become of the river they had loved. They fought off tears as they stepped out of the truck.

The green ribbon of vegetation alongside the river had been clear-cut and the hills surrounding the river sculpted into giant exposed-dirt stairsteps. The river itself was choked off by an imposing cement dam, a trickle of water pouring down into the nearly dry streambed.

Granda began to speak through her tears.

“You see the way that human power and the ambition for money destroys nature and destroys places where people enjoyed coming with their families, where there was tranquility and peace, and now there is none,” she said. “It’s lamentable to see the way our rivers dry up and the waters run out. Lamentably, they don’t think of the future for our children. What are we going to have to give to our children and their children? The government has simply ignored the community, the call of the people who don’t want these projects of death.”

With nothing to be done about their own river, they piled back into the truck and headed to the next battle, another 30 minutes down the road.

Members of the Guardians of the River of Paraíso stand in front of one of the pieces of heavy machinery they blocked with their encampment. (Tracy L. Barnett)

Trouble in paradise

Huddled under a canvas tarp in the scorching midday sun, members of the grassroots group Guardians of the River were clustered around a radio when Sánchez and the others arrived. One leader, “Maestro” Edidio Bonilla Serrano, was doing an interview on a local radio station, explaining what had happened: A hydroelectric dam company had gotten permission to put an 8-foot pipe through the middle of this rural neighborhood to carry water from Río Piedra to a hydroelectric project in another watershed.

This was the town of Paraíso, with a population of about 220. It draws visitors from around the world to enjoy the surrounding lush forests, the mountain breezes, and the crystalline Río Piedra that runs along its edge — all of which are threatened by one of the country’s most powerful contractors.

About 40 local residents are taking a stand, camping out in the middle of what used to be a shady country lane, now razed of its grand old trees, baking in the tropical summer heat. They had set up camp 41 days before March 10, the day of Granda’s group’s visit, a day no one present would likely forget.

Residents have collected intact pottery and hundreds of pottery shards they believe date from ancient times, and a large petroglyph lies 45 meters from the construction site. The National Institute of Culture is currently investigating the case. (Tracy L. Barnett)

They were there to stop the bulldozers and other heavy equipment parked down the road from leaving. On the table was a large collection of pottery shards, evidence they were preparing to submit to the National Institute of Culture, along with photos of the petroglyph that lies 45 meters from the dam site. No site inspection had been done to investigate the presence of the archaeological remains, they say, and an environmental impact assessment was filled with irregularities.

The group was camped alongside the ample front yard of Rosa Sánchez, a teacher and mother of two boys. She had been away in her native Chile when the contractors descended, cutting down her fence and 15 trees, she said. She and her husband had carefully tended those trees and all the others that they had planted on their reforested land. But now, like the rest of their neighbors, they were fighting to hold onto the refuge they had created.

Her neighbor is Mishael Rivera, a nature guide neighbors call the Bird Whisperer. Rivera, who grew up nearby on the banks of the Piedra River, participates in the annual Cornell University bird count, he said, and he has drawn upward of 200 hummingbirds at a time to his backyard, with as many as 25 different documented species — more than any other place in Panama. Hummingbirds are sensitive, however, and they have nearly disappeared with the noise of the construction.

Sánchez, Rivera and a half-dozen other neighbors escorted their visitors on a tour of the devastation. Neighbors carried umbrellas to shield them from the sun and recalled the trees that used to stand there — a huge cedar, a jacaranda, an oak.

Soon the scene opened up to a vast gouge in the earth, where two large backhoe loaders and a fleet of dump trucks sat grounded. They had carved through a hillside and used the fill to cover the cut-down trees and level the valley into a huge platform — part road, part staging ground, part entrance to what was to be a dam. The group stood on the edge and peered some 15 meters down to the rubble pile at the edge of the wetlands and river below. Farther down, a spring had been bulldozed and a trickle of clear water made its way through the mud.

Suddenly, word came that the contractor was on his way to the encampment and was threatening to bulldoze his way through with his equipment.

Women from the Guardians of the River, collecting pottery shards from the construction site, shield themselves from the brutal sun with umbrellas. (Tracy L. Barnett)

The group hurried back to find a crew from the construction company engaged in an intense discussion with the activists. They demanded to be allowed to remove the equipment; the group refused, saying they were concerned the crew would enter through another area and continue the work.

“Your complaint is not with us,” Damaris Sánchez declared at one point. “It’s with the government, who should never have approved this project to begin with.”

The standoff continued into the late hours, when members of the construction crew returned, rammed the gate with a pickup truck until it fell, and ran over the fence and banners that hang on it — including, to the ire of the River Guardians, a Panamanian flag. The whole episode ended with Rivera being punched in the eye for taking photos of the incident. Police eventually responded but declined to press charges.

Late that night, over tea and bread, Rosa Sánchez reflected on the whole episode. The peaceful times before the construction commenced seemed a distant memory.

“We didn’t even know we were happy,” she mused. “The only good thing to come from this is that now we know what it is we have to fight for. But now we will have to win it back in order to have it again.”

The petroglyph of Paraíso, covered with mysterious markings from the past, lies 45 meters from the construction site. (Jonathan González Quiel)

For “Hermana Tita” López, hearing about these struggles in her former home district elicits sad memories. The scene has changed, but the story stays the same; now she worries as the Ngäbe community she works with is being flooded by a dam project in their region.

Last year’s murder of internationally recognized anti-hydroelectric-dam activist Berta Cáceres in Honduras — who for López and many others was a model of resistance — brought the issue home in a frightening way. Panama is far from the level of violence that Honduras has sunk to, she said, but she worries that Panama could be next.

“I as a sister am defending a movement really similar to the ’80s, with activists being persecuted throughout the Central American region,” she said. “When the delegates of the word were killed, it was because they opposed the military forces and the governments who use the military forces to repress whatever movement of protest for rights. Now I would say the focus of our environmental activism should be for the defense of human rights — because the rights to land and to water, those are fundamental rights.”

A big part of the problem, she said, is that people don’t make the connection between their materialist, consumerist lifestyle and the impacts in faraway lands — in part due to the interests of extractive industries, and in part because that model has been exported to countries like Panama, where people aspire to the same lifestyle.

“People need to turn around and see the cost of maintaining this system, exploiting the natural commons … up to the point of taking lives,” she said. “Millions and millions and millions of people in the world are affected, and they have to realize that it’s crazy because it’s a system that does away with the lives of people in other parts of the world so that they can have their comfort.”